If you don't have any musical instruments, and you don't want one, then don't get one. The point is, keep an old laptop for working out ideas if you have to. Not for NetFlix and the like.
If you meant anything like that, it wasn't at all clear from your initial comment, which makes no statement about the age of a laptop and refers to "everything" not just high-end computers.
Even with your clarified version this seems to be heavily other optimizing. That's low hanging fruit for buying a better highly productive life for certain personality types. Some people like downtime and like watching things (to use your example) and others will not do well without some forms of entertaining distractions.
What can I purchase with $100 that will be the best thing I can buy to make my life better?
I've decided to budget some regular money to improving my life each month. I'd like to start with low hanging fruit for obvious reasons - but when I sat down to think of improvements, I found myself thinking of the same old things I'd already been planning to do anyway... and I'd like out of that rut.
Constraints/more info:
Background:
This is a question I recently posed to my local Less Wrong group and we came up with a few good ideas, so I thought I'd share the discussion with the wider community and see what we can come up with. I'll add the list we came up with later on in the comments...
It'd be great to have a repository of low-hanging fruit for things that can be solved with (relatively affordable) amounts of money. I'd personally like to go through the list - look at candidates that sound like they'd be really useful to me and then make a prioritised list of what to work on first.